Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey: Gender, State and Development

Sariaslan, Kübra Zeynep (2023). Empowering Housewives in Southeast Turkey: Gender, State and Development. I.B. Tauris 10.5040/9780755646517

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The Southeast Anatolia Region is one of the least developed parts of Turkey. For decades, development aid from the government and NGOs has been offered, with women in the area – particularly housewives – being invited to state-initiated opportunities for education and employment. But what is the impact of these ‘empowerment programmes’ and whose interests do they serve?

This book draws on ethnographic research conducted in empowerment programmes for marginalized women to understand how these projects operate and why they have failed. Based on interviews and observations, the book argues that everyday barriers in Turkey’s ‘gendered regime’ still impede women’s potential, and that the programmes’ own feminist agendas are undermined through their capitalist ethos of personal growth and culturalist reasoning. Particularly revealing is the state’s large-scale regional development project, the ‘Southeast Anatolia Project’, which is the priortiy and ultimately facilitates women’s structural exclusion. Situating the ongoing empowerment programmes within the larger social engineering project of the Republic of Turkey – which is long associated with emancipating women through top-down measures – this book highlights the repetition of failure in women’s liberation in the history of the country.

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